Borough Park is a recurring destination in Devorah’s childhood, associated in the account with Orthodox Jewish psychiatric offices and Jewish bookstores. It is more than a neighboring district: trips there place her near institutions that might help her, and near books that enlarge the world she is allowed to know. In particular, its Judaica shops offer a compromised kind of refuge: religious books are available there, but so are works forbidden in her household and community.

Medical consultations

Chaya persuades Zeidy to let her take Devorah to another psychiatrist after two earlier consultations in Borough Park. Both previous doctors were Orthodox Jews. The first judged Devorah normal; the second disclosed what she had said to him, after which she stopped speaking and he eventually gave up. The prospect of seeing a woman doctor follows those failures, though the account does not specify that the new doctor’s office is in Borough Park. The district is thus linked to an attempt to obtain care, but also to Devorah’s mistrust of adults who are meant to help her.

Bookshops and restricted reading

Borough Park’s Jewish bookstores provide Devorah with access to reading beyond the narrow selection Zeidy approves. He favors Yiddish tales of legendary tzaddikim and periodicals, while works by liberated Jewish writers are banned in the household. Devorah is surprised to find that the bookstores sell such prohibited literature, and feels less guilty bringing a book home from one than from a library. Reading Tevye the Milkman unsettles her expectations of Yiddish as a formal language; The Chosen, with its recognizable Williamsburg streets, offers the stronger shock of seeing her own surroundings made into literature.

One clandestine purchase makes the district’s risks and attractions especially concrete. After repeated reconnaissance trips, Devorah enters a small Judaica shop on New Utrecht Avenue when it is empty and buys the Schottenstein Edition of the Talmud. She claims that the book is for her cousin, pays sixty dollars—mostly in singles earned babysitting—and watches the old bookseller wrap the large volume in brown paper. Zeidy has warned that a lie shows on the forehead; on the bus back to Williamsburg, Devorah worries that the women around her can read her deception from the conspicuous parcel. Once she is down the block from the shop, however, she skips with joy. The purchase is not simply a book acquisition: it is a deliberate breach of the gendered boundary that keeps the Hebrew books in Zeidy’s locked closet for men.

A route back to books

After a summer at camp without books, Devorah again rides the bus to Borough Park in the week before school starts, determined to find reading and newly able to enjoy time alone with her thoughts. She brings home the newest Harry Potter book, the first volume of Philip Pullman’s trilogy, and A Tree Grows in Brooklyn. The reading list connects her own Brooklyn childhood to Francie’s fictional one, while her memory of The Chosen gives her a model for recognizing herself in a book. Borough Park therefore recurs as part of a larger geography of escape: a place reached by bus where forbidden texts can be found, carried home, and used to imagine a life beyond the limits of her immediate surroundings.